I wrote a post on April 22 highlighting the illegality of making a bomb joke at airports by discussing the arrest of a woman, Rosalinda Baez, for doing just that at JFK. A JetBlue flight attendant denied Baez access to the plane carrying her luggage, and she asked: “What if I had a bomb in my bag?” She was then arrested for falsely claiming there was a bomb in her suitcase. She has written in to this blog, explaining that she wasn’t joking at all:
I actually was NOT joking. I was asking a very serious security question after being denied boarding onto a flight I’d checked in for, with a bag, 96 minutes prior to departure. I was denied boarding because the gate agent decided to “close the flight early” (evidently to try and make a jump in the queue at JFK so that Jetblue wouldn’t miss it’s ‘on-time departure status’ quota). The agent closed that flight KNOWING that there was a bag on board for a passenger who had not yet boarded. I asked her: “Isn’t it a security risk to allow a bag to fly without a passenger? What if there was a bomb in the bag?”
As a frequent world traveler, it struck me as (more than) odd that policy in post-911, fear-mongering, check-in your shampoo unless if it’s even 3.1 OZ would ALLOW this OBVIOUS security flaw. It is LAW in over 19 developed nations to remove the bag of a passenger if said passenger does not board the flight. But, evidently NOT in the USA. And as a result, my life is being balanced by some over-zealous FBI agents who don’t want to allow the obvious question asked by me to become public question……….hmmmmm….